Browe I do agree in making ships more useful, but removing vanilla functions is not the answer to that, as it would break water pvp which is a part of pmc as  a lot of fighting occurs over ships and near water forts.  Vanilla boats are a rankup requirement, no one wants to reconfigure that.  My suggestion would be to maybe increase small boat speed a bit, so like Dhows/Schooners/Brigs would be much faster, maybe so that dhows and schooners are almost as fast as vanilla boats, and brigs approach that speed.  As I do agree ships are not as useful as they should be.